This Week in Reaction (2016/05/08)

[Point of order: Hestia Society has put up a handsome new “front page” of Neoreaction.]

Jim, Jim. We’ll lead with Jim… the Most Right Wing Person on The Internet. He has incisive commentary on the American Law Institute Sexual Assault Draft, basically requiring a woman to “hereby affirmatively, being of sound mind and body, consent to sex”. Saith Jim:

Normal decent people just don’t do sex in accordance with Harvard rules and they are not going to start. They are going to go right on doing it the way it always has been done.

We are all criminals now.

Next Jim ties together a couple of threads in “The Summoner’s tale”, explaining how the holiness of the progressive priesthood leaves them no other option but to punish evil migrant diversification. Along the way some gems. Like the nature of Cathedral Power such as it is:

Contrary to Cathedral myth, nobody got killed in Tiananmen Square. The authorities, having the warriors cheerfully obey them, were able to quell the protests with very little fuss. You only get real violence when the priests succeed in sowing disunity among the warriors. Recall what happened when “Occupy Wall Street” ran into Wall Street rentacops.

What happened, I hear you ask?

Answer: Absolutely nothing happened, because Wall Street rentacops were certain of their duty and the righteousness of performing their duty. If you are a rentacop, you believe in private property rights. It is part of your training, and if you don’t believe in private property rights, you fail your training. So when Occupy showed up to violate private property rights, the rentacops said “No” and Occupy failed to violate private property rights. And similarly, nothing happened in Tiananmen Square.

The pardoner was in the business of selling indulgences. He was more expensive than the priest, but with him you had to be repentant. Sometimes buying the indulgence was worth it.

I notice that the going price for refusing to take rapeugees in Europe is about US$250 000 per rapeugee rejected. Diversity is good for you and if you don’t want the immense benefits of diversity you have to pay US$250 000 per diversity. Which is about the same as the price that our priests pay to live far away from the victims of white oppression. Which, realistically, sets the value of diversity as negative US$250 000 per browner person.

He draws these themes together in his next a brilliant description of Formalism, and why it’s important.

The more the actual distribution of power differs from the nominal and formal distribution of power, the more political repression is needed, and the more those that exercise power need to act illegally.

Patriarchy is formally illegal. But, as with the case of sodomy in the bad old days, it’s pretty difficult to detect if you don’t go painting a sign on your back. The time is not quite right for Patriarchs of the World, Unite! The Committee awards an ☀ “Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for this related pair of articles.

Dividualist delivers another superb bit of analysis: Getting Status Right. Standard theory says there are two kinds of status: prestige and dominance. Modernist ideology, which may be approximated as weaponized envy with little loss of accuracy, shoots spit wads at the former and pours acid on on the latter.

15th-century representation of cleric John Ball encouraging the rebels in a Peasant Revolt

[A]ny social structure and hierarchy, in order to function in a stable way, has to have both. It’s basically carrot and stick. When the peasant asks why should I respect that lord, there is first the carrot answer – because the lord is smart, educated, and good and generally wishes the best to you. That is prestige. If the peasant isn’t happy with the answer, then there is the stick answer: because he has ways to force you to – that is dominance. Prestige is the good cop, dominance the bad cop, both maintain the social order. Elites try to be liked if they can, and if they fail, then they try to be feared.

However, before we think it all is just tools for justifying “oppression” we should consider human tribalism and group dynamics. People are generally more afraid of getting oppressed or otherwise harmed by the outgroup, like the neighboring country or the other ethnic group or religious group or something. Thus having strong, dominant, even intimidating leaders is at some level reassuring – because it suggests they are a good at kicking the outgroup’s butt and protecting you from them.

The Dividualist earns another highly-rated ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Nick Land delivers his controversial offering of the week: Independence. Independence qua particularity qua anti-universality. I don’t think its quite the right word. Dividualist is there to offer the best nuance.

Speaking of Nick Land, Migration Period holds his “The Lure of the Void” as the point for which DE was merely prelude.

Seth is also prompted by Land’s Independence essay to compose extended musings on Independence, Sovereignty, and Networks.

Independence, Land continues, is a rough synonym for sovereignty. I would add that independence is a rough synonym for power. Minus independence, I cannot do or get what I want. Of course, power is always constrained (by the laws of physics if not by other humans), so a degree of dependency or inter-dependency is always there to constrain independence. Land’s point is that some ideologies will emphasize one constraint over the other. Do we emphasize inter-dependence and admit a degree of independence here and there? Or do we emphasize independence and admit a degree of inter-dependence here and there?

Reactionary Future has a brief note: Political structure dictates culture. And even more to the point: True reaction, wherein:

The upshot is that a true opponent of Liberalism is now in existence. The De Jouvenlian system explains what to do in that it makes clear that short of restructuring the political system to remove blocks, you are fated to liberalism -both in power and in all opposition. Politics determines culture. The prize is the political structure, end of story.

Richard A. Brookes continues on the subject of sexual exploitation in The Child Brothel. It’s UK-centric, but worth a read. How bad is it? About this bad:

Arguably, the logic of harm reduction, as applied to drugs, prostitution, abortion, and so forth, suggests that given that many of these girls (and even boys) are going to spend their lives as de facto whores, they would be better off being kept by responsible adults as legitimate concubines or catamites than being left to make their own black-market arrangements. I’m not seriously advocating that, but it’s a perspective—either society finds a future for these children or it doesn’t. It’s hard to talk about future time orientation without a realistic better future to orient towards.

Atavisionary was prompted by Warg Franklin’s and my musings about dissidents to recall John Derbyshire’s “Dissidents and Doom” speech, adding his own commentary on the subject.

He also has a quick note showing that the lottery can be an Idiot Tax… in more ways than one.

And, speaking of dissidents, what could be more dissident than a ward full of insane people? Atavisionary provides the Schizophrenia Anecdote. Finally, he puts his fine google fu to work in digging up: Dark Enlightenment: The beer. Perhaps this is the Official Malt Beverage of the Restoration we’ve been waiting for.

Filed under Broken Clocks Twice a Day, Sydney Trads quote: Slavoj Žižek from “The Sublime Object of Ideology”. And another one from: Richard Viguerie, “Conservatives Betrayed”.

Nydwracu engages in a bit of Land speculation. Yes. It is a pun.

Can this imagined institutional god-intelligence be made friendly? If you side with humanity, you hope so. You pray for FAI or FALC, and you hope and assume that these superhuman forces will turn themselves to our ends. Perhaps capitalism will dissolve itself, or perhaps it must be pushed (by the stump-orator class, one assumes, but how?)—but in the end, there will be God, and He will be benevolent.

If, on the other hand, you side with abstract intelligence…

(and you reject orthogonality)

…you see, and you see positively, the potential of humanity as a boot-loader for something inhuman.

He also explodes The myth of the myth of Trump’s working-class support. Or how you’d lie with statistics if you actually knew what the data even meant in the first place. Regarding Hillary’s support, Nydwracu has The Democratic primary in one chart—Guess the X-Factor Edition. And he has a bit of linguistics geekery about The collapse of Anong causatives.

Nydwracu also dabbles in a bit of sinusoidal history to predict The Fifth Great Awakening, or at least wave hands in that general direction.

Then he tackles Is Marxism marginalized in academia? No. At least not by any reasonable definition of “marginalized”… or “Marxism”. Which (apparently) leads to the following bit of original research: The origins of “cultural Marxism”, the phrase not the phenomenon, which is arguably as old as multi-cultural civilization itself. 1948 appears to be the first use. You’ll have to read Wes to find out moar.

Slumlord has some fine musings Human Nature and Political Society. Specifically, why the latter should basically fit the former. It’s a bit of pretty well-oiled political theory and an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀:

Stable “low energy” states are those which intuitively coalesce, where human nature is not taxed by its membership of them. A state based upon the “intuitive” emotions,experience and morality of the people is far easier to maintain than one which is pushing against human nature all the time. Catering for homophily which is near universal is different from catering to violent jealousy which is exceptional. Equating the two is wrong. A society which pushes against violent jealousy is going to require less “policing” than a society that pushes against “homophily” and is thus more stable.

Stable societies are build on an understanding of human nature and not a rejection of it. Still, there does need to be some regulation of its more primitive aspects but the approach should be one based on the minimal amount of intervention necessary, not wide scale social engineering. Incidentally, this is one of the reasons why Puritanical societies go feral once the thumbscrews are released. Human nature only stand so much deformation.

Mark Citadel wishes everyone a blessed Pascha, the Most Holy of Days, and offers some personal reflections thereupon. Happy Easter, my Eastern brothers.

Froude Society delves deeply into some recent history of the Middle East: O, She was, the Mother of All Battles. Solid research and analysis and an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Filed under “Signals, signals everywhere, and not a thought to think,” Alf has an unflattering snapshot of The current opinion of Dutch white males.

Spandrell has some notes (and graphs) on The Evolution of the Sexual Marketplace, in Japan specifically, but it mirrors similar observations made in the West. Also a quick (and funny) one: Giving up Treatment.

Sarah Perry finds the social psychological literature on dares a bit thin. Which prompts her to compose this article as a partial remedy: Dares, Costly Signals, and Psychopaths. There’s the costly signaling (ritual) angle to understand dares. And then there’s another angle:

A social person will display fear when asked to jump from heights, disgust when eating a worm or a mud pie, shame when violating a social norm in public, guilt when disobeying moral authority or causing harm. The remorse displayed afterwards may be part of the information offered by dares.

Dares, in other words, are a psychopath test. They allow the opportunity to scrutinize people’s displays of social emotions on demand, rather than having to wait for an aversive event to happen.

And there’s a whole lot more. For her unique contributions here, the Committee awards an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀. RTWT.

Mark Citadel is supremely well-positioned to commentate upon the recent election of Sadiq Khan, which he has: London Has Fallen .

It might be too early to say this, but there is a real chance that London has seen the last of its white mayors. Now that it has been done once, the majority will do it again. This is how balkanization and fragmentation actually happens. It’s why the Counter-Jihad movement was looking at this threat all wrong, focusing on the specter of growing Islamic populations in European cities, rather than the growing non-white populations in European cities. Every Muslim in London could have stayed home and Khan would still have won the race because the dichotomy set up by leftists is one of white oppression, and so who will a black Seventh Day Adventist from Jamaica vote for? Why, Khan of course!

Citadel earns an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Over in Nederland, Alf points out Mark Rutte is een Hoorndrager. That just sounds bad.

Free Northerner outlines economic Economic Options—”on-socialist, non-liberal, and traditionalist measures that could be potentially taken to stop the rapaciousness of the modern US economy.” Have to say, I agree with most of them. Where they clash with libertarian principles, they’re libertarian… at the national level.

And in CWNY’s Saturday Epistle: A meditation upon Blood, Hearth, and Faith.

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This Week in Social Matter

Ryan Landry stays up on the news. If the world ended, I’d hear about it from Landry. So when Trump comes to Indiana, you can bet he’s gonna be all over that like a cheap suit. He relates his findings in A Trump Rally Revival. It seems, he chooses the allusion to religious fervency rather carefully.

Pundits mock [his speeches] because Trump is not speaking the approved talking points. He is speaking to you. All the third rails of politics that you want discussed are out in the open. Trump uses his long right arm as a conductor would and exaggerates points, snaps or slows down the pace of delivery. Focus. He mentions the wall, and when he asks who will pay for it, thousands scream “Mexico”. By now in the campaign, the crowd knows the chant “Build the Wall,” which gives Trump a moment to walk off and point to people behind him. Even when Trump mocks himself, he is still the most amazing man with the most beautiful, wonderful plans waiting for you next year.

Fade in those soulful strains of the Hammond B5 Organ…. If you’re immune to the spectacle, you’re probably not human. But come back in five years to see if your life has indeed been turned around.

Mark Yuray is back in his normal Tuesday slot with Eastern European Underperformance And The Ministry Of Repatriation. “Brain Drain” is, of course, alive and well, but since it’s implicitly racist to talk about it, you almost never hear about it anymore. And its effect on Eastern Europe has been profound.

Landry comes back on Wednesday, with Weimerica Weekly—Foodie Edition, a phenomenon which he describes on the home blog as “lifestyle striving”.

David Grant continues with his series: Reading Thrasymachus Part II. This edition focuses on Socrates’ wearing down various conceptions of justice.

What Socrates has accomplished in the Thrasymachus is the destruction of rival authorities: Polemarchus first appealed to the poets and wise men of yore; Tharsymachus then appealed to experience. Socrates demonstrates in the dialogue that neither of these sources of knowledge is adequate for truly comprehending justice. Philosophy, on the other hand, can do so, not simply by offering a descriptive account of justice but rather as a process leading to noetic understanding.

Coming out on Friday (Friday??!!!), Mark Christensen has The Reactionary Ethos And The Forging Of Elites: A Response To Ross Douthat. It is an absolutely flawless and magisterial piece. A taste:

Spot the Elites.

[T]he American paradox is that its elite is one of the few in history which seems not to realize that it is an elite, or at the very least tries desperately to pretend that it is not. If a reactionary solution to America’s crises is ever to be implemented, then one of the firsts tasks is to demand that the American elite recognize its position and start taking its responsibilities seriously.

This paradox becomes positively dangerous when one considers what it means to have an elite bathed in the liberal tradition. In the American spectrum, the conservative takes liberty as his founding principle, the liberal takes equality, and the more radical leftist takes fraternity (called “solidarity”). These are of course the values of the Revolution, and predictably each introduces their own element of conflict into the social order.

With respect to our honorable mentions this week, Christensen’s article was an almost instant ☀☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Award☀☀. He says a lot and says it well. RTWT.

Finishing up with a rare Saturday post: “The Authors” present Limericks From 1788. They’re pretty funny. And, of courese, limericky. And if the little birds have gotten in right, we may be seeing more arts, high and low, on future Saturdays in the future.

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This Week in 28 Sherman

Over on the home blog, Landry’s Big Monday Post™ concerns Protestants, Progs and Islam . “How can the progs join forces with Islam?”, he asks. They are species of the same thing.

Next he sings the praises of Spandrell’s Song Series . Well deserved I think. And an handy portal for the entire series. Spandrell as “Gloomy Gus”… priceless.

This Week in WW1 Pics: Pigeon Lofts—mobile ones.

For Friday, SoBL has a brief “Yippee” for Trump Victorious. The GOPe has been defeated, at least for a time. He marvels at what it took.

There is definitely deep interests that are okay with Trump’s stances and his proposals. The scary part is what it took for them to get airtime. There needed to be a man with enough visibility, enough money to self-fund, skin thick enough to take the insults and a mind that knew how to manipulate modern media and social media. I do not think Trump wins in November, and even if he wins, I don’t think much changes, but let’s all take a moment to thank him for destroying Jeb Bush.

So… now who’s the Gloomy Gus?

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This Week in Kakistocracy

Porter takes up the news of the attacks on Trump supporters in What Grows in California. He concludes:

The scenes in California weren’t at all about politics, but the grinding of tribal tectonic plates. More friction will follow with or without Donald at the fore.

Filed under Great Lines from Forgettable Movies: My Name is Richard Roma. He has, along with commentary, a heart-warming video of German Minister of Justice Heiko Maas getting a notable lack of “consent” from the people he putatively works “for”.

Next, Porter has a pretty thorough exposé A Fowl Deed—laying bare the “externalities” Tyson Foods has foisted upon the (once) tiny, (once) bucolic (once) town of Shelbyville, TN.

In foreign affairs: Greece is the time is the place is the motion. (For the under-45 crowd, here is a secret decoder ring for that title.) As we’ve come to expect, cask strength Porter excellence in this one. Hard to excerpt, because it tells a more or less complete story… of ruination.

Greece’s cradle to grave of democracy is only one of its prominent features.

And speaking of foreign affairs, filed under Perhaps Not So Foreign After All: Setting Sail Again. He comments on Russia’s homesteading experiment in its own far-east that I tweeted about and whose existence Ryan Landry predicted back in January. Porter’s got some pics. And they are beautiful.

The Kamchatka peninsula is the furthest east frontier of Russia

One of the rarely discussed features of human physiology is the fact that white people have feet too. I think it’s going to become one of the more inconvenient appendages to future politicians and social planners. These being a class who presumes a perpetual immobility of their despised tax base.

Exit beats voice, every time. Everything beats voice. Even voice.

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This Week in Evolutionist X

Evolutionst X kicks off the week asking: What the hell do the terrorists even want? They want power of course. Like anyone else. Terrorism exists because terrorism works, for sufficiently large values of “work”. Wherever you see Mutt, look around for Jeff.

Next a brief observation, and useful analogy, from IRL weeding duties, The Walls Tear Themselves Down: Borders as points of Disorder.

She has a really fine meditation here on Helplessness and Power.

One of the most horrible villains in the Harry Potter series isn’t over-the top, sad-backstory Voldemort, but Dolores Umbridge—a plump Hogwartz teacher who dresses in pink, decorates with fluffy pink curtains and china plates with pictures of kittens on them, and makes Harry Potter write apologies in his own blood for, IIRC, having honestly states that Voldemort was back. She is the image of sweetness and propriety while torturing students and helping Voldemort, and there’s nothing Harry and his friends can do to stop her from using the official wizarding world bureaucracy to take over his school, at least until they lure her into the forest and trick her into getting abducted by centaurs.

In real life there are many Doloreses, but no centaurs.

Agency is naturally unevenly distributed. To equalize outcomes, liberal democratic governments must suppress the power of those with more of it. Lacking an executive with the legitimacy to rule by fiat, power is ceded to bureaus which succumb to immediately Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy.

And we do paperwork because we aren’t allowed to punch each other anymore.

The Committee awards an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀ for this one.

This Week in Anthropology Friday: Aboriginal Witchcraft, excerpts of interest from William Smith’s Aborigine Myths and Legends (1996).

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This Week in West Coast Reactionaries

Adam Wallace has Further thoughts on Being Oneself. And they’re awfully good ones. Until one has a working definition of the self, being one’s (so-called) “self” is a command to run through a mindfield of manicheist delusions on one hand and blithe rationalizations on the other.

I am a person; one being amid many. What differentiates myself from others is the physical, mental and spiritual dimensions of my being in relation to those of others. My mentality has been formed in accordance to external factors throughout my brief life thus far, the reactions to things, my thoughts, habits, sentiments, and so forth, have all been formed in relation to that which is external. Had I been born in India to Brahmin parents, not only would all these things be different, but would I truly be “me”? No, I would be someone else. Therefore, the “me” can only be established relatively. Had the “me” existed elsewhere, it would not be “me,” but someone else.

Testis Gratus makes some first-hand Observations at the Seminary. He highlights the better points, but his impression is decidedly rather mixed:

Gratuitous pic of girl on swing chair in snow

The seminary utilized what I will call the “hermeneutic of pseudo-orthodoxy” to explain away all the errors and heresies that modernism brings along with it. This is common for neo-Catholics. To them, Francis is only misquoted and misinterpreted; it is never his own fault that what he says borders on heresy. Neo-Catholics don’t see the contradiction in defending doctrine with the words of Church fathers, such as Aquinas and Augustine, while stripping away everything that is not the bare essentials just to get along with the liberals and have a Protestantized Mass. They would rather sit on the fence and take the “moderate” position because choosing a side means making enemies and holding strong convictions, which takes work and effort. They do not understand the how dire the state of the Church is.

Coinage of The Week Award for: “Hermeneutic of Pseudo-Orthodoxy”.

P. T. Carlo, whom we know from Social Matter is over at WCR this week with David Brooks: Pundit of the Last Men. Keep your friends close, your enemies closer, but your ostensible friends buried in the cellar:

Brooks’ methods are dangerous because they are effective. Accordingly, his work stands in stark contrast to the precious naivety and childish passion displayed by the contemporary Left. Compared to the bimbo snark of Jezebel or the teenage wit of Slate and Salon, Brooks seems like the proverbial “adult in the room.” Even the shrill screeds spouted by the harpies at The New Yorker are but sound and fury compared to Brooks’ subtle and relentless propaganda.

Propaganda, you say?

Brooks pays lip-service to traditional social structures and norms while actively denying the deeper truths which those structures merely symbolize. Brooks perceives these impulses and customs not as imperfect reflections of a sacred order, but the necessary and unfortunate means to reach Brooks’ telos: comfort. Comfort, obtained by means of moderate virtue and moderate vice. Everything is measured against the yardstick of Utility. Why get married? Well to increase your earnings obviously! Married men, after all, make significantly more than their single counterparts. Should one get religion? Of course! Regular religious attendance correlates strongly with stable marriages and overall life satisfaction. After all, how would our hyper-atomized commercial civilization function without a healthy Protestant work ethic?

Fantastic essay from Mr. Carlo and an ☀“Official” #NRx Best of the Week Honorable Mention☀.

Also from Wallace: Trump is not the next Augustus… “but neither is he the next Caligula”.

At your sixty-eighth year, you have the option of retiring with your supermodel wife to endless holidays, luxuries, etc., as your three eldest children—all of whom who have grown-up to be spotless masters of their crafts just like their father—inherit the family name and continue your legacy, and your two youngest children grow into their privileged lives full of potential and growing room without a worry in the world. You can die after twenty years of pleasures peacefully in your sleep, your star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame stays undefaced, your memory lives on in television and business for decades to come, and your children carry on the Trump name with prestige and pride.

Or, alternatively, you can run to become the president of the United States of America.

I am totally convinced that Trump is running, to put it in his own words, “to give something back.” I do not believe for a second that there is any vanity or indulgence in what he is choosing to do. Facing unprecedented hatred from the established media, threats of assassination, and worse possibly to come, Trump is literally putting his life on the line. And for what?

Not for mere ego, that’s for sure. He will certainly be a step back from the evangelistic export Progressivism, in spite of the fact that his innate values are (almost certainly) progressive. He’s friend enough to the common man, and sufficiently business savvy, to avoid making his “religion” an issue. And that hasn’t happened since Reagan.

Wallace finds something on /pol/ worth making permanent: Anonymous on the Effects of Pornography. Speculative, but not obviously wrong. Lust is desiring some good you don’t have a right to possess. But that’s comparatively a virtue compared to desiring something intrinsically disordered.

Finally at WCR this week: The Plebeian Podcast Series 3 Episode 2: The Nature of Cycles.

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This Week around The Orthosphere

Over at Imaginative Conservative, Joseph Pearce writes on Barack Obama’s Defense of Slavery. Slavery under the velvet glove of globalism, that is. Roger Scruton appears there, as well, daring to speak evil of the dead in The Revenge of Pierre Boulez, Destroyer of Music.

Evan Brann is has more on Socrates: Proportions, Dialectic, & the Image of the Good. Also, a reminder that I probably need to see it for the first time (and that America once kinda-sorta opposed communism), The Horrors of Communism: Roland Joffe’s “The Killing Fields”.

Over at Gornahoor, Cologero rips Alain de Benoist a new one on The Religion of Europe. Deservedly in my opinion.

Matt Briggs becomes a Movie Star in Climate Hustle. Of course he is already a Radio Star, i.e., of the W. M. Briggs Radio Show: Are We Smart Enough To Know What Intelligence Is? And he has up chapter abstracts for his forthcoming book Uncertainty: The Soul of Models, Probability & Statistics.

Briggs goes down to The Stream with Study ‘Shows’ You Don’t Have Free Will. Choose Not To Believe It.

Finally, doing nothing more than his duty as Epistemological Stickler of the Reaction®, Briggs asks (and answers): Do People Really Believe In Chance & The Deadly Sin of Reification?.

At The Orthosphere Proper, Kristor takes up the problem of demystification in formalism: Zadok the Priest & Nathan the Prophet Formally Chrismated Solomon King.

J. M. Smith examines The Four Faces of Leviathan.

Filed under You Wouldn’t Think This Would Be News (But it Was To Me), Chris Gale asks, rhetorically, Hospitals are dangerous? Just how dangerous was shocking, and a good reason to stay out of hospitals. Also Your brain on ECT—that’s electro-convulsive therapy. Yes, it’s still in use, and yes, it can still do some good for some patients.

Mark Richardson of Oz Conservative has An even more revealing Swedish video. Pretty standard issue Red Pill 101 questions, but presented to preternaturally conformist Swedish college students, they lead to some interesting answers. (And squirming.)

Bonald points out the error in adultery apologism—basically churchmen, like Pope Francis, trying to find elements of virtue in the context of objective sins, the existence of which never having been denied by irreformable Church teaching, but quite beside the point—i.e., of objective sin.

What does the Catholic Church have to say about my practice of stealing women’s purses and giving money to the homeless? It is a difficult case, is it not? Clearly not the Christian ideal, but there are certainly elements of sanctification in it.

Exxxxx…actly.

Cato the Younger notes that We Do Not Belong. Which is not to say that we are not connected deeply and properly to place, to kith and kin, but that those are not an end in themselves. The particular is not so much something to be grasped as elevated by sacramental connection to transcendent purpose for men and nations.

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This Week… Elsewhere

Over at 80 Proof Oinomancy, Ace considers a faithless woman, or rather the suspicion thereof: “… zero to 60; can it outrun her memory?”

If I trust her so little…

If I am so certain of her faithlessness…

If I doubt her honesty so much…

Why am I even desirous of her?

Also from Ace: Tips for dealing with disagreeable people online, if you must at all.

Brett Stevens explains why White Nationalism Is Doomed To Failure. And this was interesting: How First World Governments Have Bribed Their Citizens Into Compliance, a focus on “lifetime spending inequality”, which is much narrower than the much bandied income inequality. Sadly, that’s not actually good news.

Brett gets a lot right here: The Self-Inventing Totalitarian State. And some of it out-of-key. If it weren’t late, late on a Tuesday night, I’d have a better description of what.

Also at Amerika, tragedy of the commons is revisited in How Leftism Will Kill Public Life In America. Will?!! And Wilkinson has a handy Classification System for SHTF Events, including the anthropogenic.

Gabe has an introduction to Seeing Stagnation. Vertical progress (0 to 1) is hard to imagine, and getting harder and harder to imagine.

Filed under Placing Blame Squarely Where It Belongs, Roman Dmowski exposes The Transgender Business . . . The Fruit of Philosophical Nominalism. Dmowski also considers The Nationalist Political Realignment. Left vs. Right has turned about 30° to Globalist vs. Nationalist. It remains to be seen, I think, whether these coalitions will be any more effective or permanent than past ones. But strict two-party politics, like that which arose in the US, not only makes for strange bedfellows, but for pretty brisk bed-hopping.

Filed under First Step to Recovery is Admitting You Have a Problem: Reactionary Ferret comes out with Yes I Am Against Political Correctness. He also offers some needful clarification: Trilby vs Fedora. So, is calling a Trilby a Fedora proof of Fedora-ism? Or is it just Trilby-ism??

Over at Dissident Right, August J. Rush looks at the history and culture of the American South in Southron Dreams. His portrait of the South is beautiful, but given current levels oxidization he is not sanguine about the prospects for an independent Southern Nation today.

Knight of Númenor presents some Inspirational Music for Traditionalists: King of the North, Celtic Music. Very epic.

Bad Billy Pratt brings on another mashup Senior Prom and “Overboard” (1987).

Kurt Russell, Michael G. Hagerty in Overboard (1987)

It’s stupid. It’s not real… American politics should carry the same disclaimer like those old psychic hotline TV ads: “for entertainment purposes only,” leading to legitimate questions regarding the intelligence of anyone who actually takes this shit seriously. There’s a reason why Hunter Thompson ended up turning the ’72 primaries into a betting sport- when you’re waist deep in the muck of American politics, and see the moving parts up close, you get a sense that the big picture is complete bullshit; democracy is a dog and pony show.

Functional democracy has too many necessary ingredients to be viable.

It’s a foregone conclusion Americans will elect a Clown. Formalism dictates that his actions in office should match his qualifications.

Over at Carcinisation, Grumpless Grinch is not impressed with Neoreaction A Basilisk. But not, apparently, for all the best reasons.

Robert Mariani groks neoreaction on a deep level in Their works will come to nothing.

The contemporary right, even and perhaps especially the alt-right, is distinguished from neoreaction on the most basic level by the fact that they support the application of political energy, too. They even go as far as co-opting the phraseology – “smash capitalism” and “smash the patriarchy” are substituted with “smash the state” and “smash cultural Marxism.”

But trying to beat the left on its own turf doesn’t make sense for two reasons: you’ll look like a doofus since they have sovereignty over their turf’s memes, and their turf is the space of things that will inevitably fail.

Over at Deconstructing Leftism, Thrasymachus celebrates an Art Appreciation Day—“Las Meninas”.

In his on-going series of posting Big Interesting Things, Reactionary Tree presents Filippo Tommaso Mainetti’s 1909 Founding and Manifesto of Futurism.

A very nice bit of logic from Axel McKibben in Why equality destroys: shortest version. Not quite a Snapple lid, but that’ll do.

Delta Kyklos has a compelling apology for Metaphysics aimed directly at positivist center of mass.

Oriental Neoreactionary has an anecdote, How My Ancestors Thought About the Modernity, which doesn’t speak well of Bucharest.

This is interesting: Greg Cochran’s You don’t need a weatherman. Apparently they have a new way of looking for very very recent human genetic adaptation, last one or two thousand years we’re talking. History may not be solely the domain of dusty old books for much longer.

Anonymous Conservative finds One Man’s Genes Passed To Half Of Western Europe. “How one bronze age king impregnated thousands of women with this one crazy secret!” Also: In Sweden, The Apocalypse Becomes Commonplace. I had no idea it had gotten that bad. I’d heard people allude to it, but it was never much on the radar. Well, I hope the Swedes got a lot of dopamine in their receptors for learning and compulsively living their liberal platitudes so well. They were always above average.

Welp, that’s all I had time for. Sorry this is a day late. Give some link love to the neoraction front page. Keep on reactin’! Til next week, NBS… Over and out!!